Notes

[1]This refers to preparations for a monetary reform in order to
establish a stable Soviet currency and overcome the inflation caused
by the war and the economic policy of the tsarist government
and the bourgeois Provisional Government. Lenin raised the
question of the need for a monetary reform in December 1917 in
his “Draft Decree on the Nationalisation of the Banks and on
Measures Necessary for Its Implementation” (see present edition,
Vol. 26, p. 403). Preparations for the monetary reform wore made
under the direct guidance of Lenin. He urged more speed in
preparing and issuing new, Soviet currency notes, and went into
all details of the proposed designs. (See this volume, documents
125 and 126, and also Lenin Miscellany XXI, p. 180.)

Owing to the foreign military intervention and the Civil War,
and the transition to the policy of War Communism, the
monetary reform was not carried out in that period. The first Soviet
monetary reform on the basis of Lenin’s principles was effected
in 1922–24.